Excerpt from A House by the Sea

Reading Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction and loving it. Some great stories and essays – I have more to say in detail but for now a quick note and an excerpt from P.H. Lee’s “A House by the Sea”, which describes the life of the former residents of a certain basement in Omelas.

Do you believe it now? Can this really be how they live out their lives, so close to the City that they can hear the bells clamoring and the processions proceeding? Can they really live together, in a house by the sea? No? Let me tell you this, then. There used to be a doctor—a nice man with a real white doctor’s coat, who still lives in the City—who came out to their house every Wednesday to check up on them, but that didn’t work out, because he kept feeling uncomfortable and trying to euthanize them. So now, whenever one of them gets sick, a woman comes in on the train from Vallcoris. She doesn’t have a doctor’s coat. She just has a sweater. She doesn’t know about the basement, she doesn’t know about anything, not really. She just takes their pulse and asks them to cough, and leaves them with prescriptions, and no one tries to euthanize anyone.

Putting this in a sort of mood-file in my imagination, along with the title story of The Open Cage by Anzia Yezierska.